"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
Would you mind explaining why people who've spent all their lives working hard to build up an inheritance should be forced to give it up for people who haven't done so?
I'll leave aside any discussion of the Boomers as the luckiest generation in history, and instead simply ask: Where else is all the money going to come from? The state is collapsing under the weight of dependency already, and much of business and most of the working age population has already been bled white.
If we're going to have enough capacity in the health and social care system, as well as for an adequate defence establishment, policing, courts of law and everything else, then the obvious place to look is asset wealth, and most particularly the immense store of treasure locked up in residential property.
I've actually a certain amount of sympathy for the "But I paid my taxes?!" attitude - at the end of a lifetime of toil, it's small wonder that people want the bloody government to finally leave them alone - and if only 2% of the population were retired then society could afford to keep indulging them with an endless regime of inflation busting pension hikes and light touch taxation. But they're not 2%, they're 20%, and rising. And I've no time at all for the facile attitude that anyone who is worth less money than I am is one of the undeserving poor and should be left to rot. Rescuing the less well off isn't about rewarding laziness or failure, it's about having a decent society, a functioning society, and about the mutualisation of risk.
The money has to come from somewhere, and we have already reached the point where better off retirees really need to join the rest of us in being rinsed for funds. The hospitals are already collapsing under the weight of need in a manner that we went through lockdowns only five years ago in an effort to avoid, just because of a difficult flu season, and the rows and rows of frightened elderly people on trolleys in A&E departments waiting days for a bed will include both those who could and could not afford to buy a house, regardless of how hard they bloody worked decades ago.
Your house is only worth so much to you if you suffer a nasty fall and have to lie on the kitchen floor in your own piss for two days waiting for an ambulance to turn up, and it's also only worth so much if the police are too weak and depleted to bother to investigate if someone breaks into it and nicks all your jewellery. So, what do we do?
Although I'm sceptical about the "I earned it" argument against taxation of assets. You didn't earn it. You earned enough to buy it at the the original price. The rest of the value is capital gain, asset inflation, call it what you will. Why should that not be taxed?
Why should it? We shouldn't tax things just because you can.
That isn’t the point. The point is to find additional ways to fund the quality and extent of government services that the electorate demands
IMV there's a fundamental issue: the electorate demands 'better' public services, but are less keen to pay for it. Or, more accurately, they want someone else to pay for it.
Which is why few parties go into elections telling the electorate that they're going to put up loads of taxes...
This is something of a cliché and it is a cliché because there is a lot of truth in it. But think of it from a private sector perspective.
Most businesses, who want to remain in business, constantly strive to give their customers more for less. That is how they remain competitive. They will invest to improve their product or service in both technology and training. So why can't our public sector achieve the same? Why is it a given that they can only do more with more? Or, in recent times less with more? That is the real problem we face.
We have recently tried to register my Mother in law's death. There are no Registrars Offices open to the public anymore as there were when my mother died. You phone a number and you find that it is the local authority's general number. Getting through was complicated and time consuming (as it always is when you have to contact Angus Council about anything, one of their favourite tricks is to say the person you want is not currently available and then cut you off). When you do eventually get through the long queue you are told everything has to be done online. But even when you have given all the relevant information that is not the death registered. You then need to have a discussion with the Registrar himself once he has looked at the information provided. His next available appointment was 8 days away. You cannot proceed to organise the funeral until you have done this.
The whole procedure seems entirely for the convenience of those who work in it. No consideration at all is given as to what is convenient for the public using that service or what they might want. This is typical of so many public sector services now. No business, without a monopoly, could possibly operate that way. Why do we have to put up with this? Why is it more important that they can work from home, have flexible hours for them, not for the public, always be "exceptionally busy", set their own pace, etc etc. And don't get me started on HMRC whose service has deteriorated beyond measure since the local offices shut. There is, in my view, a real mindset problem here.
HMRC's issues are due to reduced staffing numbers.
Angus's problem is utter stupidity. their front line customer service should be filling in those forms for those unable / unwilling to do so because otherwise it's straightforward age / disability discrimination. And remember my day job is exactly this type of productivity improvement.
When was the last time a public service increased its opening hours or availability to the public? I remember when banks had restricted opening hours and then they didn't. Why are public services immune from such improvements? Because they are principally concerned with the people who work in them, not what they are actually doing. I am fed up of it.
When a service is put online, it becomes 24 hours, 7 days a week (normally - there are exceptions like Companies House whose website is 9...5).
Now, online's not for everyone, of course. But it's a meaningful increase in hours.
My GP practice, and my local hospital, have both been increasing their hours.
A the GP routine is 8:30am to 6pm. They have a service called GP Extended Access with is from 7am two mornings a week, and continues until 8pm one everning per week, and sometimes operates on Saturdays. In addition to the GP24 out of hours service cover from the PCT.
And my local hospital has been doing Saturdays and Sundays for some clinics for some time - several years.
Plus we all have 111, which came in in 2014 as a national service - upgrading from NHS Direct.
Let's give credit where it is due.
You try and get an appointment to actually see the GP in person.....
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
Would you mind explaining why people who've spent all their lives working hard to build up an inheritance should be forced to give it up for people who haven't done so?
I'll leave aside any discussion of the Boomers as the luckiest generation in history, and instead simply ask: Where else is all the money going to come from? The state is collapsing under the weight of dependency already, and much of business and most of the working age population has already been bled white.
If we're going to have enough capacity in the health and social care system, as well as for an adequate defence establishment, policing, courts of law and everything else, then the obvious place to look is asset wealth, and most particularly the immense store of treasure locked up in residential property.
I've actually a certain amount of sympathy for the "But I paid my taxes?!" attitude - at the end of a lifetime of toil, it's small wonder that people want the bloody government to finally leave them alone - and if only 2% of the population were retired then society could afford to keep indulging them with an endless regime of inflation busting pension hikes and light touch taxation. But they're not 2%, they're 20%, and rising. And I've no time at all for the facile attitude that anyone who is worth less money than I am is one of the undeserving poor and should be left to rot. Rescuing the less well off isn't about rewarding laziness or failure, it's about having a decent society, a functioning society, and about the mutualisation of risk.
The money has to come from somewhere, and we have already reached the point where better off retirees really need to join the rest of us in being rinsed for funds. The hospitals are already collapsing under the weight of need in a manner that we went through lockdowns only five years ago in an effort to avoid, just because of a difficult flu season, and the rows and rows of frightened elderly people on trolleys in A&E departments waiting days for a bed will include both those who could and could not afford to buy a house, regardless of how hard they bloody worked decades ago.
Your house is only worth so much to you if you suffer a nasty fall and have to lie on the kitchen floor in your own piss for two days waiting for an ambulance to turn up, and it's also only worth so much if the police are too weak and depleted to bother to investigate if someone breaks into it and nicks all your jewellery. So, what do we do?
Although I'm sceptical about the "I earned it" argument against taxation of assets. You didn't earn it. You earned enough to buy it at the the original price. The rest of the value is capital gain, asset inflation, call it what you will. Why should that not be taxed?
Why should it? We shouldn't tax things just because you can.
That isn’t the point. The point is to find additional ways to fund the quality and extent of government services that the electorate demands
IMV there's a fundamental issue: the electorate demands 'better' public services, but are less keen to pay for it. Or, more accurately, they want someone else to pay for it.
Which is why few parties go into elections telling the electorate that they're going to put up loads of taxes...
This is something of a cliché and it is a cliché because there is a lot of truth in it. But think of it from a private sector perspective.
Most businesses, who want to remain in business, constantly strive to give their customers more for less. That is how they remain competitive. They will invest to improve their product or service in both technology and training. So why can't our public sector achieve the same? Why is it a given that they can only do more with more? Or, in recent times less with more? That is the real problem we face.
We have recently tried to register my Mother in law's death. There are no Registrars Offices open to the public anymore as there were when my mother died. You phone a number and you find that it is the local authority's general number. Getting through was complicated and time consuming (as it always is when you have to contact Angus Council about anything, one of their favourite tricks is to say the person you want is not currently available and then cut you off). When you do eventually get through the long queue you are told everything has to be done online. But even when you have given all the relevant information that is not the death registered. You then need to have a discussion with the Registrar himself once he has looked at the information provided. His next available appointment was 8 days away. You cannot proceed to organise the funeral until you have done this.
The whole procedure seems entirely for the convenience of those who work in it. No consideration at all is given as to what is convenient for the public using that service or what they might want. This is typical of so many public sector services now. No business, without a monopoly, could possibly operate that way. Why do we have to put up with this? Why is it more important that they can work from home, have flexible hours for them, not for the public, always be "exceptionally busy", set their own pace, etc etc. And don't get me started on HMRC whose service has deteriorated beyond measure since the local offices shut. There is, in my view, a real mindset problem here.
HMRC's issues are due to reduced staffing numbers.
Angus's problem is utter stupidity. their front line customer service should be filling in those forms for those unable / unwilling to do so because otherwise it's straightforward age / disability discrimination. And remember my day job is exactly this type of productivity improvement.
When was the last time a public service increased its opening hours or availability to the public? I remember when banks had restricted opening hours and then they didn't. Why are public services immune from such improvements? Because they are principally concerned with the people who work in them, not what they are actually doing. I am fed up of it.
What proportion of these problems is down to the staff being wilful and the organisation incompetent, and how much is down to the usual problem of too few people and not enough money?
Before very much longer, your average council will be statutory only and it won't even be able to manage those responsibilities properly. That's got very little to do with working from home and almost everything to do with a tsunami of homeless families, disturbed children and knackered old people that need looking after.
One of the accused I was dealing with this week arrived in this country 12 years ago as an unaccompanied minor. He has, ever since, lived in hotels at our expense because of the way our system is set up. He is restricted in what he can do in terms of work. He has had very limited education. He still needs a translator after being here all that time. He has got himself in quite serious trouble. Is this surprising? Not at all. What an appalling life. We are spending insane amounts on our immigration and asylum system for very poor results.
There are some demographic pressures, we are getting older as a society. But the suggestion that we cannot improve both the quality and efficiency of the services being provided is simply wrong.
Oh I agree, and I don't doubt that there are areas of maladministration that remain to be addressed. But there's still no getting away from the fact that the primary problem underlying the deterioration of the public services is the imbalance between demand and available resources. Returning to your previous example, when local authorities are having to spend the bulk of their budgets on social care, it's small wonder that everything else suffers.
It's not just 'areas of maladministration' being 'addressed' - by a long report containing a series of recommendations, and once they are implemented it's done for the next 10 years. In the private sector there are constant meetings about how to cut costs, improve sales, make the user experience simpler and better, etc. etc. - because if these things don't happen, you go out of business. The same incentives need to apply in the public sector, whether by real market competition or a version of it.
Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2024)
"Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."
"Ignorance is his stock in trade, camouflaged by purple prose, inane fluff, and (un)righteous indignation. The Message has proven that conclusively. His lack of self-awareness, simple errors of fact, parochial worldview, incuriosity about history or context, entrenched bias, and failure to ask basic follow-up questions make this book a searing indictment of its author and the cult that has grown up around him."
Read it rather than this bizarre critique which when you have read it you will realise makes no sense whatsoever unless he has some particular animus towards the author or another agenda altogether.....I'll investigate
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
Only thing I differ on is I remain successful.
Definition? Appearing on Towie; more money than Croesus; large family that turn up dutifully every Xmas ....
The most successful people I have come across are single mothers who raise their children. They are a fearsome bunch.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
Would you mind explaining why people who've spent all their lives working hard to build up an inheritance should be forced to give it up for people who haven't done so?
I'll leave aside any discussion of the Boomers as the luckiest generation in history, and instead simply ask: Where else is all the money going to come from? The state is collapsing under the weight of dependency already, and much of business and most of the working age population has already been bled white.
If we're going to have enough capacity in the health and social care system, as well as for an adequate defence establishment, policing, courts of law and everything else, then the obvious place to look is asset wealth, and most particularly the immense store of treasure locked up in residential property.
I've actually a certain amount of sympathy for the "But I paid my taxes?!" attitude - at the end of a lifetime of toil, it's small wonder that people want the bloody government to finally leave them alone - and if only 2% of the population were retired then society could afford to keep indulging them with an endless regime of inflation busting pension hikes and light touch taxation. But they're not 2%, they're 20%, and rising. And I've no time at all for the facile attitude that anyone who is worth less money than I am is one of the undeserving poor and should be left to rot. Rescuing the less well off isn't about rewarding laziness or failure, it's about having a decent society, a functioning society, and about the mutualisation of risk.
The money has to come from somewhere, and we have already reached the point where better off retirees really need to join the rest of us in being rinsed for funds. The hospitals are already collapsing under the weight of need in a manner that we went through lockdowns only five years ago in an effort to avoid, just because of a difficult flu season, and the rows and rows of frightened elderly people on trolleys in A&E departments waiting days for a bed will include both those who could and could not afford to buy a house, regardless of how hard they bloody worked decades ago.
Your house is only worth so much to you if you suffer a nasty fall and have to lie on the kitchen floor in your own piss for two days waiting for an ambulance to turn up, and it's also only worth so much if the police are too weak and depleted to bother to investigate if someone breaks into it and nicks all your jewellery. So, what do we do?
Although I'm sceptical about the "I earned it" argument against taxation of assets. You didn't earn it. You earned enough to buy it at the the original price. The rest of the value is capital gain, asset inflation, call it what you will. Why should that not be taxed?
Why should it? We shouldn't tax things just because you can.
That isn’t the point. The point is to find additional ways to fund the quality and extent of government services that the electorate demands
IMV there's a fundamental issue: the electorate demands 'better' public services, but are less keen to pay for it. Or, more accurately, they want someone else to pay for it.
Which is why few parties go into elections telling the electorate that they're going to put up loads of taxes...
This is something of a cliché and it is a cliché because there is a lot of truth in it. But think of it from a private sector perspective.
Most businesses, who want to remain in business, constantly strive to give their customers more for less. That is how they remain competitive. They will invest to improve their product or service in both technology and training. So why can't our public sector achieve the same? Why is it a given that they can only do more with more? Or, in recent times less with more? That is the real problem we face.
We have recently tried to register my Mother in law's death. There are no Registrars Offices open to the public anymore as there were when my mother died. You phone a number and you find that it is the local authority's general number. Getting through was complicated and time consuming (as it always is when you have to contact Angus Council about anything, one of their favourite tricks is to say the person you want is not currently available and then cut you off). When you do eventually get through the long queue you are told everything has to be done online. But even when you have given all the relevant information that is not the death registered. You then need to have a discussion with the Registrar himself once he has looked at the information provided. His next available appointment was 8 days away. You cannot proceed to organise the funeral until you have done this.
The whole procedure seems entirely for the convenience of those who work in it. No consideration at all is given as to what is convenient for the public using that service or what they might want. This is typical of so many public sector services now. No business, without a monopoly, could possibly operate that way. Why do we have to put up with this? Why is it more important that they can work from home, have flexible hours for them, not for the public, always be "exceptionally busy", set their own pace, etc etc. And don't get me started on HMRC whose service has deteriorated beyond measure since the local offices shut. There is, in my view, a real mindset problem here.
HMRC's issues are due to reduced staffing numbers.
Angus's problem is utter stupidity. their front line customer service should be filling in those forms for those unable / unwilling to do so because otherwise it's straightforward age / disability discrimination. And remember my day job is exactly this type of productivity improvement.
When was the last time a public service increased its opening hours or availability to the public? I remember when banks had restricted opening hours and then they didn't. Why are public services immune from such improvements? Because they are principally concerned with the people who work in them, not what they are actually doing. I am fed up of it.
What proportion of these problems is down to the staff being wilful and the organisation incompetent, and how much is down to the usual problem of too few people and not enough money?
Before very much longer, your average council will be statutory only and it won't even be able to manage those responsibilities properly. That's got very little to do with working from home and almost everything to do with a tsunami of homeless families, disturbed children and knackered old people that need looking after.
One of the accused I was dealing with this week arrived in this country 12 years ago as an unaccompanied minor. He has, ever since, lived in hotels at our expense because of the way our system is set up. He is restricted in what he can do in terms of work. He has had very limited education. He still needs a translator after being here all that time. He has got himself in quite serious trouble. Is this surprising? Not at all. What an appalling life. We are spending insane amounts on our immigration and asylum system for very poor results.
There are some demographic pressures, we are getting older as a society. But the suggestion that we cannot improve both the quality and efficiency of the services being provided is simply wrong.
Oh I agree, and I don't doubt that there are areas of maladministration that remain to be addressed. But there's still no getting away from the fact that the primary problem underlying the deterioration of the public services is the imbalance between demand and available resources. Returning to your previous example, when local authorities are having to spend the bulk of their budgets on social care, it's small wonder that everything else suffers.
Doing dumb stuff because some people are angry is not a solution. See the mistreatment of unaccompanied minors.
Resources and demand could both be addressed by looking at the way we live. Eating less crap would be a place to start. The cost of people living off unhealthy food was put at circa 300bn per year in the UK.
A hoola hoop and chicken nuggets tax . That’s what we need. - Those guys with their pineapple pizza penalty charge have the right idea.
"So, Starmer and Reeves must bear the impact of crashing into the brick wall of [an emergency Budget on] 26 March together. Between them, they have failed to give themselves enough room to avoid the collision. The only thing that can save them is some good luck on the economy that brings the OBR forecast back into line with Reeves’s fiscal rules in time."
I've come to the conclusion that this and every future Government is going to fail, until something effective is done about both economic inequality and the dependency ratio. The measures required, which will essentially amount to stripping wealthy elderly people and their heirs of a large chunk of their riches, and telling everyone under the age of about fifty that they will have to keep working into their seventies before they can claim the state pension, are going to be so unpopular that the country will have to keep circling the plughole until it falls into some major systemic crisis that will force ministers to act.
An unsustainable rise in gilt yields as foreign investors conclude that we are a basket case seems the most likely scenario, although the collapse of the healthcare system leading to mass avoidable fatalities might also do it. We shall see.
Would you mind explaining why people who've spent all their lives working hard to build up an inheritance should be forced to give it up for people who haven't done so?
I'll leave aside any discussion of the Boomers as the luckiest generation in history, and instead simply ask: Where else is all the money going to come from? The state is collapsing under the weight of dependency already, and much of business and most of the working age population has already been bled white.
If we're going to have enough capacity in the health and social care system, as well as for an adequate defence establishment, policing, courts of law and everything else, then the obvious place to look is asset wealth, and most particularly the immense store of treasure locked up in residential property.
I've actually a certain amount of sympathy for the "But I paid my taxes?!" attitude - at the end of a lifetime of toil, it's small wonder that people want the bloody government to finally leave them alone - and if only 2% of the population were retired then society could afford to keep indulging them with an endless regime of inflation busting pension hikes and light touch taxation. But they're not 2%, they're 20%, and rising. And I've no time at all for the facile attitude that anyone who is worth less money than I am is one of the undeserving poor and should be left to rot. Rescuing the less well off isn't about rewarding laziness or failure, it's about having a decent society, a functioning society, and about the mutualisation of risk.
The money has to come from somewhere, and we have already reached the point where better off retirees really need to join the rest of us in being rinsed for funds. The hospitals are already collapsing under the weight of need in a manner that we went through lockdowns only five years ago in an effort to avoid, just because of a difficult flu season, and the rows and rows of frightened elderly people on trolleys in A&E departments waiting days for a bed will include both those who could and could not afford to buy a house, regardless of how hard they bloody worked decades ago.
Your house is only worth so much to you if you suffer a nasty fall and have to lie on the kitchen floor in your own piss for two days waiting for an ambulance to turn up, and it's also only worth so much if the police are too weak and depleted to bother to investigate if someone breaks into it and nicks all your jewellery. So, what do we do?
Although I'm sceptical about the "I earned it" argument against taxation of assets. You didn't earn it. You earned enough to buy it at the the original price. The rest of the value is capital gain, asset inflation, call it what you will. Why should that not be taxed?
Why should it? We shouldn't tax things just because you can.
That isn’t the point. The point is to find additional ways to fund the quality and extent of government services that the electorate demands
IMV there's a fundamental issue: the electorate demands 'better' public services, but are less keen to pay for it. Or, more accurately, they want someone else to pay for it.
Which is why few parties go into elections telling the electorate that they're going to put up loads of taxes...
This is something of a cliché and it is a cliché because there is a lot of truth in it. But think of it from a private sector perspective.
Most businesses, who want to remain in business, constantly strive to give their customers more for less. That is how they remain competitive. They will invest to improve their product or service in both technology and training. So why can't our public sector achieve the same? Why is it a given that they can only do more with more? Or, in recent times less with more? That is the real problem we face.
We have recently tried to register my Mother in law's death. There are no Registrars Offices open to the public anymore as there were when my mother died. You phone a number and you find that it is the local authority's general number. Getting through was complicated and time consuming (as it always is when you have to contact Angus Council about anything, one of their favourite tricks is to say the person you want is not currently available and then cut you off). When you do eventually get through the long queue you are told everything has to be done online. But even when you have given all the relevant information that is not the death registered. You then need to have a discussion with the Registrar himself once he has looked at the information provided. His next available appointment was 8 days away. You cannot proceed to organise the funeral until you have done this.
The whole procedure seems entirely for the convenience of those who work in it. No consideration at all is given as to what is convenient for the public using that service or what they might want. This is typical of so many public sector services now. No business, without a monopoly, could possibly operate that way. Why do we have to put up with this? Why is it more important that they can work from home, have flexible hours for them, not for the public, always be "exceptionally busy", set their own pace, etc etc. And don't get me started on HMRC whose service has deteriorated beyond measure since the local offices shut. There is, in my view, a real mindset problem here.
HMRC's issues are due to reduced staffing numbers.
Angus's problem is utter stupidity. their front line customer service should be filling in those forms for those unable / unwilling to do so because otherwise it's straightforward age / disability discrimination. And remember my day job is exactly this type of productivity improvement.
When was the last time a public service increased its opening hours or availability to the public? I remember when banks had restricted opening hours and then they didn't. Why are public services immune from such improvements? Because they are principally concerned with the people who work in them, not what they are actually doing. I am fed up of it.
When a service is put online, it becomes 24 hours, 7 days a week (normally - there are exceptions like Companies House whose website is 9...5).
Now, online's not for everyone, of course. But it's a meaningful increase in hours.
How and why does Companies House have a website that works only office hours?
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
Only thing I differ on is I remain successful.
Definition? Appearing on Towie; more money than Croesus; large family that turn up dutifully every Xmas ....
The most successful people I have come across are single mothers who raise their children. They are a fearsome bunch.
Ancient history never was my strong point, but didn't Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo?
The suggestion is any other general would have lost Waterloo given the predicament the French forces were in, but Napoleon won a lot of battles other generals wouldn't have won. It's the number and consistency of his victories that gives Napoleon his high score.
Other high scorers are julius Caesar and Hannibal. Alexander does well, but he only played in 9 battles. So that’s like a cricketer with a very high batting average but only 9 tests. Napoleon did a lot of battles so his stats are robust.
Also Napoleon seems to have fought a lot of battles where his troops were heavily outnumbered, winning almost all of them.
He won a lot of battles, but lost the war...
Indeed. But I guess Napoleon had already lost the war before he stepped foot on the field at Waterloo.
When reading that Zamoyski biography of Napoleon my overall impression was he was one of the most impressive people in history, but he also never knew when to bloody stop, so everyone ending up opposing him seemed like a given.
A lot of successful people don't know when to stop, and therefore end up being unsuccessful people.
Hitler, for example. Or Putin. Or Sunak. Or @malcolmg.
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The most successful people I have come across are single mothers who raise their children. They are a fearsome bunch.
Resources and demand could both be addressed by looking at the way we live. Eating less crap would be a place to start. The cost of people living off unhealthy food was put at circa 300bn per year in the UK.
A hoola hoop and chicken nuggets tax . That’s what we need. - Those guys with their pineapple pizza penalty charge have the right idea.